That’s the actual headline from an article in The Register (via Jalopnik) that gives us this quote:

Tony Millar explained: “The squirrel chewed through the wire, was set on fire, fell down directly to where the car was. The squirrel, on fire, slid into the engine compartment and blew up the car.”

I’m not sure who was having a worse day, the owner of the torched Camry or the squirrel. The Camry was insured, so I guess the squirrel. And the Camry owner survived.

We were talking about old school high tech stuff at work. You know, the stuff that was ‘the bomb’ back in the day:

• Mom and Dad had one of the first ‘pocket’ calculators. Made by Texas Instruments, it was about an inch thick, 3″ wide and 5 ” long, took 4 AA batteries (rechargeable with a built in charger), had red LED numbers and buttons that clicked loudly when you pushed them. It could do all the advanced stuff, you know, add, subtract, multiply and divide. They might even still have it
• In his ’77 Cutlass (Mandarin Orange with the tan ‘landau’ vinyl top, natch’), Dad had an under the dash cassette player. Now, these things were big targets for thieves, so it was mounted on a slide and you kept it under the seat when you weren’t using it.
• Grandpa has a slightly lower tech solution for listening to cassettes in his ’80 Citation. He had the in dash AM radio, the under dash FM converter that played FM stations through the AM radio by tuning into a special AM station (like the things folks use now to listen to their iPods in the car). Next to that, under the dash, was an 8-track player that, I think, played the 8-tracks through an FM station (which then went through an AM station). He then played his cassettes through cassette adapter in the 8-track player. There may have been some loss of sound quality once the signal made it to the lone 6×9 speaker in the dash.
• In my ’80 Chevy Monza I had an in-dash Pioneer AM/FM cassette player. Under that I had the 8 or 10 band EQ/amp with aux. input for my Sony Discman that I had mounted on the accessory flex arm and mount pad attached to the passenger seat. I of course had the obligatory 6×9 speakers in custom plywood boxes in the back.
• Mom and Dad bought their first color TV in 1975. It was the best of it’s day – a big 23″ Zenith in the ‘wood’ cabinet. They were still using it up until a couple years ago. We didn’t have the Zenith ‘clicker’ remote, though, we had to get up and turn the knobs (yes, knobs – clack, clack, clack) ourselves.
• Our school was fairly advanced. I remember using computers back in 6th or 7th grade. Commodore PETs. No disc drives, all programs and data was stored on cassette tape.
• In High school I had friends with Commodore 64’s adn Timex Sinclair computers that you could hook up to your TV.
• We, of course, had the Atari 2600. But the one we had wasn’t called the 2600 because there wasn’t any other model. It was just Atari. Yes, Mom and Dad still have it. My kids and my sister’s love to play it when we go to Toledo.
• My first stereo was bought piece by piece. I had 60 watt Jensen speakers with 10″ woofers and a 40 watt per Chanel Akai receiver (with touch sensitive volume control, but no remote). The coolest thing was my JVC dual cassette deck that would shuffle play songs on tape (provided there was the appropriate 4 second gap in between songs). It would click and snap, fast forward and reverse through the tape to find the 4th song, then the 3rd, then the 8th. This was before CDs and digital recording made it easy to do random & shuffle.
• Dad’s still got his high end stereo he bought in 1965. A Fisher FM tuner amp (with tubes and the ‘Stereo Beam‘), Electro-Voice speakers and a record changer. He’s since added a new single turntable, a 3M Wollensak cassette deck and a Pioneer magazine style CD changer. He has to switch between the cassette player and the CD changer because the Fisher doesn’t have enough inputs. It was a serious high end system in it’s day and still sounds pretty good now. It’s in a nice wood cabinet the size of a sofa.

Ah, memories …
I’m sure I could think of more. What sort of old school high tech stuff do you remember?

Jessie Gardner of Plastic Mind Design posts Ten Reasons Why You Should Upgrade to MT 4 Instead of WP 2.3. Or, if you count funny, maybe it’s seven reasons. Or eleven.
Whatever. Now’s the time for you WP’ers to come over to the MT world with MT4. Still free for personal use, a revitalized community, nifty new features, modular templates, MT Open Source on the horizon. Come on in, the water’s fine.
If you do make the jump, let me know how you like MT4. I’m waiting (less and less patiently) for some of my must have plugins (Photogallery, Rightfields, MTBlogroll, MT-Notifier to name a few) to get upgraded before I can make the jump. 🙁

Monday I get the following email from a co-worker:

Hi everyone! Do you know this person????? I found his camera at the Ohio State / Youngstown State game and am trying to return it to him…
Please send along to anyone who might know other OSU fans !! Not only is this a good deed but it is a social experiment to see if we really are all connected! If you know him please tell him to contact me via email at [email address].
Please help!!!!!!!!! Thank you!!!!!!!! Michelle Montgomery.

The picture above was attached to the email. By the time it had reached me, it had been forwarded at least 4 times, to dozens of recipients. It seemed legit, so I was going to post about it here at some point.
It turns out it was too late anyway. According to the Columbus Dispatch today:

John’s lost camera was picked up by a Clintonville woman, Michelle Montgomery, and her husband on their way to the game. Not confident that the university’s lost-and-found service would be able to locate the rightful owner, Montgomery decided to try a social experiment by searching for him using the Internet.
…
Montgomery, 32, who works for a Columbus human-resources consulting firm, uploaded a picture showing the man she assumed to be the camera owner, a young boy and Brutus Buckeye. She attached it to an e-mail and sent it to 14 friends.
…
Less than 48 hours later, Montgomery was talking with John, who learned from two unrelated e-mail sources that someone in Columbus had found his camera.

I love the fact that she didn’t trust the lost and found department, so she decided to find him herself. I don’t think I would have thought of that.
Just a few yeas ago, the camera would have had film in it and the pictures could not have been accessed. Even if the film had been developed, there would have been no way that one individual could possibly find an unnamed stranger. It would likely end up in a lost and found bin, gathering dust.

Annoying, painful, stupid, maddening, inscrutable, ridiculous.
Evil.
Get MovableType or WordPress and help rid the world of this abomination..
I’m just sayin’. 😀